Believe me, not at all. As soon as you even a bit different, small community will shun the fuck out of you, and you have nowhere to go because other small community doesn't want outsiders in fear of becoming not a small community.
We have evolved to pump out 12 babies and die at the ripe age of 28 while trying to pump out another one, but that's not how most of us want to organize society.
Tall poppy syndrome of small communities is probably the biggest factor in why our technological progress was so slow for so long. Humans 100,000 years ago were basically the same as us and yet inventions took thousands of years.
Societies tend to go through faster periods of inventions when certain conditions are met. One of them is war, that drives inventions.
Another one is a more equal society. In societies where you get to use your invention yourself and benefit from it yourself there is more incentive for more people to do it. If your invention is mainly going to benefit elites, fewer people spend time inventing. This is one of the reasons why empires historically stagnate towards the end.
Envy is not the same as tall poppy syndrome. Tall poppy syndrome is when it is easier to ruin your competition vs be better. The murder rate for humanity before civilization was incredibly high, higher than any other mammal. Cave paintings show successful hunters being mocked. Quite simply it was easier to kill your rival vs learn how to hunt better.
Science progress does not increase exponentially. If it did can you explain why we haven't been on the moon in fifty years and only built one nuclear reactor in that time period? Or why the clock speed of my desktop is the same as it was for my desktop 22 years ago?
Terrible schools, not enough jobs, bad transportation systems, less culture, more poverty, more peer pressure. Instead of raising a kid in a rural area you can just feed them some lead paint chips and rank up a mess of credit card debt in their name, be a lot less devastating.
I agree on all points, but I don't think it's so cut and dry, nevermind that a lot of those things can affect cities and suburbia, when I see the lives my little cousins live I feel a little bad for them. Granted, they're in one of the most violent cities on Earth so not a great example.
Sidenote: Transportation will vary a lot from place to place, as a kid my friends and I would ride all over town with bikes but I understand some towns (in the US specially) are highways with houses and a mall next to it.